


What Deserves Remembrance

by Katherine



Category: The Praise Singer - Mary Renault
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-15
Updated: 2011-12-15
Packaged: 2017-10-27 08:57:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/293990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katherine/pseuds/Katherine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He can continue to tell of the past to the many who ask him, while keeping the shape of his life in his head until he has set all in order to tell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Deserves Remembrance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fawatson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fawatson/gifts).



There is no theme to a man's life, although Aischylos could tell of how to find one for the arc of a tragedy. Simonides himself has done something like to that, to make the shape of a song. What else is a victor's hymn that lays out the path taken to victory. What other a epitaph for the dead, as he had made for Pisistratos; the Archon's theme being justice, in Simonides' framing.

Yet as for marking his own life, Simonides has not a central theme. Unless it be change, and that is too much an axiom.

He can continue to tell of the past to the many who ask him, while keeping the shape of his life in his head until he has set all in order to tell.

He is resistant to being numbered with the old men who wish to tell of the world they used to inhabit which has passed on. Yet it is natural enough to begin with his childhood. Something of Keos, and enough to frame how he left, but no more than that. He could tell of keeping the sheep, holding his music within when not out on the hills, but need not tell of the injustices of childhood that have weight only to a child. Nor even the necessary justices that cause grief.

There are times when, looking back upon those, Simonides can see the pattern in his life as one made by keeping secrets.

His own keeping a sacred secret his deep desire for music... even now, that seems inevitable. Even had he known as a boy still home that his father would claim honor in the work of music, Simonides could not, he is certain, have made his songs under his father's eye. He had never confided with the idolised brother who protected him as much as any could; how much less could he have told even stirrings of song to his stern father. Perhaps, like the hiding fawn in that verse of Anakreon's, some boys hide themselves by nature.

Simonides was formed in great part from that secret. The shoots of song that came up from the epics he composed among the sheep, to the pattern of the women at their looms, to the sweep of ships seen beyond the harbour: all of those would have been some other form, or never grown from seed at all.

Only after that heavy secret and the pain of back bared to punishment for assumed untruth was he was set free. From his boyhood on Keos, to the spread-winged time of startled fledging as he was able to be so suddenly from home, to travel and learn with his master Kleobis.

For those first years, having no secrets, his master knowing him. Master and pupil as stones tumbled in company travelling together. Each day Simonides had his learning lines of Homer and the others. As well, the bright hints of the songs he himself would one day make. Simonides found them in what he saw and the forward time on the road.

It is difficult for a pupil to truly hide something from his master, especially when they have traveled together and know one another's ways. Simonides learnt that from having a pupil himself.

In Samos, Simonides had felt it both a grief and a trust to be keeping a secret again after the interview with Polykrates. He knew that was an event like a dry branch, not to bear fruit. Later in his own life he came to realise his master most likely came to know that quite soon.

Better later and in consequence, when it was only a turning away of questions in the tavern. There he seemed no man's pupil still, but was making his own name. That would have been a thing to keep from Simonides' family, but they were not by then the people with the hold on him, and his master came to something near to understanding.

Simonides' return to Keos, and the years after, there are pieces of those to tell. Simonides had his victory then, followed by grieving, and the upswing of fortune.

Here in Sicily under a different ruler and so many years on, there need not be much constraint to telling of politics and factions, all that he saw and heard of. Yet still there are things he need not speak of.

Putting his mind to subtlety reminds Simonides, now as so often, of Lyra.

Simonides gave her the tale of that swift journey to Athens, but no more than a sketch of what was there, in deference to Anakreon. That was a time when Lyra got only the outline of the tale from him, but on most occasions he told her all, privately by lamplight.

She ever had a way of turning away questions and, also, of arranging it to be clear that some questions are not to be asked.

Lyra talked politics, yet never so much as to make danger for herself. Nor, in that as in other topics, did she do less than let each man who visited know her thoughts aligned with his.

Like Hipparchos (indeed, like so many in that bright time when Athens was ascendant in the arts and trades and, they felt, the view of the world) Lyra added pieces of beauty to her things. Unlike Hipparchos, she did not have a party to show off the new, although there might be a theme built around a new statue, or the wine be dipped into a new set of red-figure cups.

Nor did she tend to throw over the old for the new. Like her lovers, who kept returning to her in age and who she did not turn away, she kept her favoured pieces, like the heavy gold lamp by the screen into her inner room.

Careful, she kept what mattered to her, and her secrets when she chose.

Keeping within his head a song which is not ready to be brought forth is a kind of secret. Not like to the boy's rough-marking on the wax, although that at least Bacchylides does not readily share.

From boyhood to the present, Bacchylides has kept his writing on the wax private from Simonides, as well as he could. Not counting the day when, laughing, he brought to Simonides the tablet his pet quail had walked over, left bird feet-marks in the scribing. That privacy went more easily for teacher and pupil than otherwise.

A grief, that the boy is one of the new youth who do not keep the words within their own memories. Simonides admits Bacchylides has made his way, despite that. Already, Baccylides is ready to make a song for Heiron's winning chariot team.

Simonides expects that all will be listening to Bacchylides soon enough. His pupil will be ascendant in his own name.

For now, Simonides still has the attention of the court. Yet, what all listeners ask Simonides for is what came later for him in Athens, and "the liberators". He can take his time getting to that. One should rarely sing the most requested song first, nor tell only the most sought after tale.


End file.
